Quickly search for and contact people from your mobile device

Have you noticed that SharePoint doesn’t offer an ability to easily search for people from a mobile device?

Inconvenient searching for information in SharePoint from a mobile device

Recently I wrote about how SharePoint doesn’t offer an ability to easily search for information from a mobile device, despite the ever increasing share of mobile devices being used to look for information. To make searching for information on-the-go easier, we have built an App for SharePoint that you can pin on your phone and be never more than a finger tap apart from searching for information.

Inconvenient searching for people from a mobile device

Searching for information in SharePoint from a mobile device isn’t the only inconvenience. Have you ever tried searching for people on your mobile phone?

If you navigate to your One Drive for Business on your mobile device SharePoint will turn the optimized user experience on.

One of the options available in that interface allows you to search for people but if you tap on it you will be redirected to OWA and will be able to search for people in your Exchange Contacts rather than in your organization! If you want to search for people in your organization instead, you will need to use the standard SharePoint search experience of which we already know that it’s rather inconvenient to use on a mobile device. Luckily, there is a better way to find people in your organization.

Easily searching for and contacting people from your mobile device

Mavention Mobile People Search is a free SharePoint-hosted app that allows you to quickly search for people in your SharePoint tenant. All you need to do is to install the app from the Office Store in your portal and share the link to the app with your users. Once they open the app on their mobile device and pin it to their home screens they will be able to search for colleagues with a single finger tap.

Once a person is found, tapping on her shows two icons on the right hand-side: e-mail and telephone allowing you to quickly respectively send an e-mail or call the particular person.

Designed for mobile

Just as our previous app, Mavention Mobile People Search is designed specifically for mobile devices. It renders quickly and adapts to your mobile device allowing you to quickly find and contact people in your organization. Rather than offering every single capability of SharePoint People Search, the Mavention Mobile People Search app focuses on a single scenario of quickly finding and contacting a person in your organization directly from your mobile device.

Similarly to our previously released app, Mavention Mobile People Search is built using Bootstrap and KnockoutJS and works on all mobile phones and different form factors so no matter if you are using a small Android device or the new iPhone 6 Plus the app should look great on your device.